From EndNote via Zotero to BibTeX

The LyX-Website mentions currently six methods for a conversion from Endnote to BibTeX. I tried every one which runs on the Mac. Some of the earlier suggestions are out of date. I got the impression that method 6 may be the best one. But even there you have

• to fiddle around with the Endnote output style file and
• the problem with non-ascii characters in the database is unsolved, because it is not so important for English speaker.
  

1. One part of the trick with my method is not to convert into BibTex format directly but to use the Reference Manager (RIS) EndNote Export output style format! [Added August 17, 2008: This is the only file format which extracts all the information from your EndNote Library. The RIS format has problems with Editors (they will be converted to "Collaborators") and first names (only the first character is transferred.)] If you can't find the necessary style file in your library you can get it via the output style page of EndNote. Type "export" in the field for publication to find all styles for export and select the Reference Manager (RIS) Export EndNote Export style for download. But note (a) that the original publisher is the ftp support site of ISI Research, (b) the files are pretty old (EndNote 4) (c) and not official but provided by the community. There may exist newer or better versions. (EndNote seems not utterly interested to provide help to get out of EndNote.)
   
   Put the output file into your EndNote Style Folder. (Look up the path in EndNote under Preferences -> Folder Location. Default value on the mac is: /Applications/EndNote 8/Styles. Add this file in EndNote to you output style menus (Edit -> Output Style -> Output Style Manager…) activate it and export the desired bibliographic records (File -> Export… -> Text Only).
2. Now for the second part of my trick: Import this new generated .txt file into Zotero. Zotero is a free FireFox browser extension for collecting, managing and citing your research notes. It has a pretty good conversion routine for import and export, especially when it comes to non-ascii characters as the German Umlaute are. It is recommended not to import huge files, because the conversion process takes time and the browser is frozen during the conversion process. For 150 records it took my about 3-4 minutes. Zotero generates a new forlder with the Name "Imported" and the time stamp.
   
   On the Zotero Import/Export Forum people have reported some problems with the conversion procedure. But I think most of the problems come from trying to import EndNote generated files of BibTex format or other unsuitable formats or to import files too large (4000 entries or so). For me the conversion was generally ok. I got 6 empty websites entries and many of my journal articles entries came with an extra note duplicated the publisher in it. But better to have more information than needed than to less . After 3 days of trying different things the above reported procedure worked quit well.
   
3. From Zotero you can easily export your data into BibTex format.